Flash Crash
Book

Flash Crash

A Trading Savant, a Global Manhunt, and the Most Mysterious Market Crash in History

Liam Vaughan
Doubleday, 2020
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Editorial Rating

8

Qualities

  • Analytical
  • Eye Opening
  • Engaging

Recommendation

Navinder Sarao must be one of the oddest financial criminals in recent memory. The Brit employed deceitful trading tactics to amass tens of millions of dollars, yet the socially awkward young man spent none of his winnings on yachts or mansions – he just went on living with his parents in a modest house outside London. This engaging account by journalist Liam Vaughan delves into Sarao’s life as a trader and his ultimate conviction by US authorities, who accused him of sparking a brief but dramatic stock market crash. Vaughan doesn’t gloss over the crimes, but he doesn’t see Sarao as evil, even though he illegally wrested millions from other market participants.

Summary

In 2003, Navinder Sarao was an aimless young man living outside London.

A child of Indian immigrants, Navinder Sarao loved football but had no apparent ambition. Looking for work, he responded to an ad in the Evening Standard seeking rookie traders. At the job interview, Sarao made a decidedly mixed impression – he dressed shabbily and didn’t make eye contact with his interlocutors. However, the misfit was gifted in arithmetic. He solved complicated multiplication problems faster than his interviewers could punch the numbers into their calculators. Sarao was asked to return for an eight-week training program. He turned up dutifully, although he’d decline to hit the pub with his classmates at the end of each day’s classes.

As a youngster, Sarao had spent hours playing video games, so he was intensely focused on his trading. Wearing industrial-grade ear protection to block out the trading room’s noise, he would stare at the screens for hours. Sarao concentrated on the S&P 500 e-mini, a futures contract based on the direction of US securities. Sarao made no claims of expertise about the US economy...

About the Author

Liam Vaughan is an investigative reporter at Bloomberg and Bloomberg Businessweek. A winner of the Gerald Loeb Award for financial journalism, he lives in London.

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